McCrindle, who was born on 3rd August 1911 in Glasgow, was a formable actor, but was effectively blacklisted because of his Communist and Equity activities for much of the important years of his career, especially from the late 1940s to the end of the 1950s.

In the period 1937-9, he appeared in a dozen plays on the first broadcasts of television before the medium was closed down for the duration of the war, sometimes being credited as Alex McCringle or Alex McGrindle, as well as in his own name.

He starred in the British BBC radio show `Dick Barton Special Agent’ from 1946-51, which ran for 700 episodes and had 15 million listeners. Alex played the role of Jock Anderson one of Dick Barton’s key henchmen and was widely loved for the role and enormously popular in it. In 1947, he was producer of the TV programme `Larry the Lamb’.

The cast of Dick Barton Special Agent, from left: Alex McCrindle (centre) c.1948. © BBC Photo Library

In the 1950s, he appeared – often uncredited to escape the blacklist– in a string of small budget movies as a character actor. But, in the main, blacklisting resulted in him devoting more time to building up Equity and securing improved pay and conditions for Actors, to meet this objective he founded Scottish Equity and he only worked in British television and then only twice during the early 1960s.

In the later stage of his career, he began to secure significant parts in films and TV programmes from `The Saint’ in 1965, and then through many other projects, with increasingly more significant parts, to `All Creatures Great and Small’ and `Taggart’ and then, in the 1977 first `Star Wars’ movie in which he played a rebel general.

George Lucas, short of capital, offered the actors on the movie "points" in lieu of salary. Big stars such as Alec Guinness, could afford to indulge in some capitalist speculation and take "points" and, in the event, the film proved to be the best move Guinness ever made financially. "Hollywood thought Darth Vader was a tough nut," one luvvie has recalled, "but they hadn’t met Alex."! He campaigned through Equity for bonuses for all actors in Star Wars, among them R2-D2 (who was played, or operated inside, by Birmingham born Kenny Baker), who also took a working wage and contributed to the success of Star Wars.

Alex had a great love of Scottish poetry and regularly read it aloud to audiences. He produced and read his own selection of 37 poems by William Soutar (Glasgow, Scotsoun, 1989) and raised money for Brownsbank Cottage.

He was married twice, the first was Sandy *Note: a name error, the second wife, Honor Arundel, the Communist children’s author and Daily Worker film critic.  The home of McCrindle and Arundel in the fifties was always a hub of Party activity and organisation, as the writer Doris Lessing notes in her autobiography.

Alex became close friends with Paul Strand, the famous photographer, and was a major asset to Strand’s in his `Tir a’Mhurain’ photography project. He went onto become Strand’s agent in Scotland, negotiating with Compton Mackenzie and visiting the School of Scottish Studies in order to help set up the project.

In the 1980s, with US screenings no longer debarred to him, he appeared in dozens of major roles on television mini-series, including "Reilly: The Ace of Spies" and in film such as `Eye of the Needle’. As late as 1987 he played the role of a jailer in `Comrades’, the film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Alex McCrindle’s obituary in the Times (Saturday 28 April 1990) was headlined ‘Communist stalwart’ and stated that he remained committed to an ‘unrelenting Marxism which lost nothing of its purity and uncompromising severity’.

His daughter Jean also became involved in politics and an award for drama was named after him. Alex McCrindle died on April 20, 1990 in Edinburgh.